9 Nov 2011

Yesterday Google+ rolled out the much-anticipated
Google+ Page feature, and now businesses, brands, products,
entertainers, and lots of other entities can have their own accounts.
I know what you’re thinking: Great, another social media page I have to manage for my company.
Hey, I’m with you — just when you think you’ve figured out how to
make business gains from Twitter and Facebook, along comes Google+,
another widespread social tool that’s a big, wide-open question mark.
But you know what? Reserving your spot for your brand now is probably
a good idea, even if you haven’t figured out what you’re doing with it.
You can register a Google+ business page here,
but keep in mind that you have to have a personal Google+ account
first. Only one user per account so far, and vanity URLs are not
available yet. But why?The Unique Benefits of a Google+ Business Page1. SEO – Google+ business pages stand out from
Facebook pages because they will have all kinds of Google SEO benefits.
This is Google using their leverage. From Search Engine Land:
“[Google+ pages] will be indexed, ‘followable’ and individual updates
or posts can be +1′d — much or all of which will be fed back into search
results and rankings.” This is huge. Your company blog/homepage can be
tied into Google+ results and will come up in searches with steady
regularity while Facebook sits behind its walled garden.2. Google+ Direct Connect – When doing a Google
search, anyone can type the ‘+’ sign and your brand and be taken
directly to your Google+ business page. How’s that for a ‘direct
connect’? The thing is, you have to embed some Google+ page code into
your site first. Here’s how to link your Google+ page to your company website.

3. Analysis Tools – Google has a huge array of free
products already in use by billions of people (Search, Maps, Calendar,
Google Analytics, etc.) You can bet they will be passing the pertinent
information along to companies with Google+ business pages. This is from
the Google+ business page
home page: “In the coming weeks we will be launching tools to give you
access to as much data as possible about your Google+ Page and +1
activity: who’s interacting with your page and how; your users’
demographics; and info about their social activities like +1′s, shares
and comments.”4. Google+ Circles – If you want to target messages
to specific demographics and locations, the Google+ Circles feature is
your friend. Don’t take my advice, though. Aaron Weber has a post about using Circles for better information, better connections, and better engagement. Or, as Google puts it, simply: “Use your circles to get the right message to the right people.”
The bottom line is that Google+ promises to make it easier for people
to find and connect with your business. The seamless integration with
other Google products makes it an essential tool for any company.
Just as we jumped in with both feet with a business page, we are jumping in with Spiral16 web monitoring as well.

Rather than waiting to “formally integrate” with Google+, Spiral16 is
actively scouring the web every day for posts that are relevant to our
clients’ topics and brands. Because our system works like search engine,
we are already picking up information from Google+. We receive and
process information differently from most monitoring solutions, so
rather than just utilizing data partners and RSS feeds, Spiral16 picks
up unstructured data that is discoverable through normal search means.
Given the rapid growth of Google+, you don’t want to let important
data about your brand or competitors on this network go unseen and
unmeasured.